California Split

California Split (Director: Robert Altman): In this 1974 film about two gam­blers, Bill (George Segal) and Charlie (Elliott Gould) bet on: poker, fights, horses, pro­fes­sional bas­ket­ball, dogs, roul­ette, black­jack, craps, keno, slot machines and even a pickup bas­ket­ball game. I sup­pose the bingo scenes didn’t make it into the final cut.

After meeting in a poker par­lour, run­ning into each other at a top­less bar, and get­ting robbed by a fellow player who felt he’d been cheated, the two become fast friends. Bill is the more ser­ious of the two. He holds down a job (barely) writing for a magazine, while Charlie seems to drift around. At the begin­ning of the film, he’s living with a pair of pros­ti­tutes, and life seems like one big party. It’s easy to see why Bill is pulled into his orbit, skip­ping work to join Charlie at the track, or, in one mem­or­able episode, pre­tending with him to be vice cops in order to pry Barbara and Susan away from a rich cross-dressing client so they can take the girls to the fights. For Bill, whose gambling seems to have a grim­ness that hints at addic­tion, Charlie makes it all seem like harm­less fun, even if they are losing (or get­ting robbed).

Charlie dis­ap­pears for a few days, and it’s when his ram­shackle anarchy is absent that we dis­cover the depths of Bill’s gambling problem. First we see him slink into a mas­sage par­lour where he plays in an all-night illegal poker game. Then we become aware that he owes his bookie a sig­ni­ficant amount of money, which he hasn’t got. As he sits in a bar next to a woman (pos­sibly another pros­ti­tute) com­plaining about how her dog “shits on the floor all the time,” we realize how out of place he is in this world. He’s slum­ming, but he’s in the grip of some­thing powerful. When Susan, the younger and more naïve of the two pros­ti­tutes, con­fesses her attrac­tion to him, he runs away, hor­ri­fied. Whether he’s ashamed of her life­style or of his own, we’re never sure, but this small chance at redemp­tion slips away.

When Charlie returns, claiming to have taken a quick jaunt to Mexico to bet on some dog races, Bill has settled on a des­perate plan. He’s going to sell all of his pos­ses­sions, including his car, so that he can play in a high stakes poker game in Reno. Following one of the fun­niest scenes in the film (see the clip below), he agrees to take Charlie along as his partner. The fact that the two of them have to take the bus to Reno says a lot about their plight.

Rather improb­ably, Bill gets on a win­ning streak in Reno but des­pite all the indic­a­tions of a happy ending, the film ends rather more real­ist­ic­ally on a down­beat note. All luck is tem­porary, bad or good, and neither win­ning nor the friend­ship of Charlie can fill the yawning empti­ness inside Bill.

Both Segal and Gould are excel­lent in their roles, and almost sell this as a buddy movie until they can no longer keep their heads above the des­pair. There’s plenty of humour in their odd couple routine and Altman’s seem­ingly sham­bolic dir­ec­tion con­trib­utes to the sense of fun. Charlie’s “I’m dan­cing as fast as I can” antics are almost enter­taining enough to make Bill (and the audi­ence) forget the real empti­ness of their lives, espe­cially in the early scenes when you feel like any­thing might happen.

Robert Altman made this film the same year as Thieves Like Us and in the midst of one of his own great win­ning streaks, from 1970’s M*A*S*H to Nashville in 1975. Incredibly, Elliott Gould was not the first choice for the role of Charlie. Robert De Niro was under con­sid­er­a­tion, and it almost went to Steve McQueen.

Another inter­esting bit of trivia. Most of the extras playing gam­blers were from an organ­iz­a­tion called Synanon, a treat­ment pro­gram for junkies and other addicts, including gambling addicts. Altman didn’t want typ­ical “Hollywood extras” and also figured he could get all these people for free, provided he made a dona­tion to Synanon. The organ­iz­a­tion was cri­ti­cized for some cult­like tac­tics and even­tu­ally dis­banded in the late 80s after trouble with both the crim­inal courts and the tax authorities.

Tagged as: gambling